Friday, May 31, 2013

Catalan police forces violently attacked today a demonstration by firefighters before the Parliament in Barcelona, injuring one and arresting another.

Some 500 Catalan firefighters staged a protest today against the budgetary cuts that will leave the Summer fire prevention campaign devoid of resources, as well as other damages to overall fire prevention. The emergency workers, who wore their uniforms for the occasion, were brutally repressed by the Catalan police, as can be seen in this video:

Beatriz, 22, suffering of lupus and severe renal problems, requested the Supreme Court of El Salvador to be allowed to abort, being an extreme case in which the child will no doubt die anyhow (suffers anencephalia: has not developed the brain) and, if the mother manages to survive at all, she will bear further severe complications in her illness.

However the high court rejected her plea because abortion is absolutely forbidden in the Central American country, no matter what.

Beatriz, mother of a 18 months old toddler, explains that the hospital team did not dare to perform the abortion because, under the fundamentalist law, they would be judged for "murder" and punished with up to 12 years of prison. The aborting mother would be punished with as much as 50 years.

Even if she would manage to travel outside the country and be intervened in another state where abortion is legal, she would still be liable for murder upon her return to El Salvador.

Beatriz is pleading to President Mauricio Funes (Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front) to intervene on the matter urgently somehow.

The dramatic situation caused by Christian Fundamentalist intolerance, which attacks women's freedoms as much as other kinds of religious fanaticism, reminds the recent similar case in the Republic of Ireland (another Christian Fundamentalist regime) where a woman was let to die in a very similar extreme case, not being allowed abortion under any circumstance.

Update (Jun 4): the intervention of President Funes permitted that Beatriz was performed a "premature birth" intervention through cesarean, which resulted in the brainless fetus dying in minutes. She is now in intensive care. (→ Naiz Info[es]).

Thursday, May 30, 2013

The strike began at midnight with pickets forcing the closure of Opencor, a chain of convenience stores that open 24 hrs/day 365 days/year, owned by the infamous Spanish mafioso corporation El Corte Inglés, which does not allow free unionization, let alone striking. A picket of some 60 people managed to have it closed in spite of violent police intervention.

Picket activity continued before dawn, with all industrial areas almost completely closed down. Police intervened in several cases.

Closed and decorated bank (Pamplona)

At least nine people (Berria says 13) have already been arrested by Spanish police in Pamplona, some of them are accused of having material to sabotage buses. Arbitrary arrests also happened in Greater Bilbao in at least two cases with ad hoc accusations like "lack of respect for police agents" or "insults and disobedience". Another person was arrested in San Sebastian accused of "disobedience" and "resistance".

Sabotage to electric feed of subway and trains took place at several locations. The line Bilbao-Balmaseda was unaffected because the company decided to use diesel machines for the occasion, but other lines suffered important delays

A fire in a trailer of Fagor also seems to have been intentional. Several ATM machines have also been attacked.

Empty industrial zones

In most industrial companies a following of the strike close to 100% has been reported. A major exception seems to be Volkswagen Navarre which only lost 35% of production.

In public services and education the estimate is between 52% and 100%.

Public transport is working at c. 55% levels, above the 30% minimal services established by authorities (meaning almost 80% following, after excluding the forced minimal services).

The Western Basque Government pretends (totally unreal!) that the following of the strike is under 20%. The Navarrese government is even more cynic, claiming a mere 5% of following.

In Navarre the following is very high. In Bortziria (Five Towns, NW) all industrial activity was nearly stopped (95-100%), in Leitza 100%, in Sakana the following was a bit weaker because there was another general strike in the district just a month ago, but still ample following, in Iruñerria (Pamplona urban district) 50-100%. The Steel Commerce sector, which is in indefinite strike in the Old Kingdom, reported a following of 70-100%, their union delegates are all concentrated in the Agustine Friars' School. The Pamplona bike-picket this time could operate normally (having suffered repression in the last strikes).

March in Txantrea (Pamplona)

Major demonstrations took place in the four provincial capitals. Another person was arrested in Pamplona after the march, while many dozens were identified by Spanish police forces.

Demo in Bilbao

Demo in Pamplona

The more repressed pickets were those exerting their right to free speech near the mafioso macro-corporation El Corte Inglés. In several cities police charged against the pickets, including one in Pamplona which surrounded the building with bloody clothes in protest for the very direct resposibility of this company with the recent Bangladesh worker massacre.

Bilbao: police vs. pickets at El Corte Inglés

Solidarity with Bangladesh at Iruñea-Pamplona

In Iruñea-Pamplona also, there were clashes in the center of the city as police harassed and attacked youth pickets, some of which eventually responded with fire barrickades. Video:

Video of the police violence against El Corte Inglés picket in Bilbao:

This blog joins the General Strike called in the Southern Basque Country against the bankster doctrine of "austerity for the poor, massive profits for the rich". Therefore I will not publish anything unless it is to report on the strike itself or a major emergency.

Wednesday, May 29, 2013

Five farmers were injured as private guards of the Nicaraguan sugar cane multinational Grupo Pellas violently attempted to expand their holdings in the Central American state at the expense of small farmers.

On May 25, a hundred of mercenary personnel of the Grupo Pellas (heavily armed security guards and other workers) attacked the land of some 90 families of the Q’eqchi’ people shooting indiscriminately, injuring five, one of them severely.

On February 13, the same corporation destroyed several hectares of rice, beans, squash and banana. Prior to the sale to Grupo Pellas, the former owners of the aggressive ranch Ingenio Chabil Utzaj, managed to evict some 14 Q’eqchi’ communities (more than 4000 people).

None of these terrorist actions have been persecuted by the Guatemalan authorities.

If you want to show your discontent you can boycott any of the many business that the terrorist businessman Carlos Pellas Chamorro owns or has alliance to: Flor de Caña rum (best known produce of SER Holding, chairman), BAC Florida Bank (chairman), GBM Inc. electronic produce (chairman), IBM (associated to GBM Holding), real state by the Pellas Development Group (chairman), Toyota, Hino, Suzuki, and Yamaha (all of which are associated with this terrorist) or oranges by FRUTAN (chairman).

The government of Ecuador, in whose embassy is refuged Julian Assange, accuses the United Kingdom of violating international law and the human rights of the journalist by not granting him a safe-conduct.

Assange has been besieged by UK forces in the Embassy of Ecuador since almost a year ago.

Chilean military police (carabineros) violently attacked again freedom of expression and protest in Santiago. The student demonstration was scheduled to march to the Heroes Plaza after marching through the Alameda, the city's main street, but was brutally repressed (again) by the police-soldiers, who arrested 600.

The government had explicitly forbidden the march through the Alameda in a clear attempt to hide the student protests that are the major challenge that the extremist right-winger President Piñera faces. All previous demonstrations have used this major street as avenue to show their discontent.

Basque political prisoners Itziar Moreno (Bilbao) and Ohiana Garmendia (Santurzti), imprisoned at Muret Seysses prison (Dijon), began a hunger strike two days ago (May 27) to denounce the abuses suffered at the hands of French prison guards, one of which pushed and threw Moreno to the ground arbitrarily and later punished her with punishment cell (isolation).

Yesterday she was denied toilet paper and, upon her protest, sent again to isolation. These kinds of abuses seem to be increasing in the Burgundian jail.

The major bloc of Basque labor unions, holding the vast majority of representativity and affiliation, and supported by a vast array of social movements (but only one significant political coalition: EH Bildu) has been calling for the last many weeks for a General Strike tomorrow May 30th in the Southern Basque Country with the declared goal of changing the social-economic model.

The strike, which is the first of this year but follows many others in the last ones, intends to be yet another show of force by the Basque Worker People against the doctrine of austerity for the poor and growing profits and power for the oligarchy, which upholds the European Union and every single member state government, with only anecdotal exceptions.

The enemy is tomorrow but also the rest of the year: the social and labor cuts, in money but also in rights.

M30 GENERAL STRIKEDignified social and labor rights
for our own model in the Basque Country

The unions calling for tomorrow's General Strike are the two major ones: Basque Workers' Solidarity (ELA) and the Union of Patriotic Workers (LAB), as well as the smaller unions ESK, CGT-LKN and CNT-AIT, and also the important sectoral unions STEE-EILAS (education), HIRU (transport) and EHNE (farmers). Spanish-nationalist unions UGT and CC.OO. have again attempted to boycott the call by the Basque union majority but their call power is minimal and declining, very especially since they have signed "stability pacts" with the capitalists and their puppet governments that actually aim to destroy worker power in order to guarantee their own mercenary subsidies.

EH Bildu will not take part tomorrow in the institutional activities, even if some plenaries have been mischievously called for the very day of the strike. In Navarre the majority of Parliament voted to cancel those institutional activities, however this did not happen in the Western Basque Country, showing contradictions in the proceedings of the centrist forces PSOE and PNV/Geroa Bai.

Most company committees (bodies elected by the workers to represent them) have adhered to the strike already.

Unions made a call to flood the streets tomorrow and not remain at home, shaking out fear in order to demand as strongly as possible a change in the anti-social policies of the oligarchic governments. The cliff between those who have very little and those who have a lot widens every day, they said.

LAB's Secretary General, Ainhoa Etxaide explained that:

Big companies trading in IBEX keep having huge profits: € 25 billion last year and some € 35 billion this one. 94% of those companies have societies in tax heavens while 4% of the GDP is dedicated to pay for an illegitimate debt: almost € 40 billions.

She also said that if we stand up, if we fight back, there wouldn't be anymore talk of pension cuts...

ELA's Secretary General Txiki Muñoz claimed that today it is more democratic to take part in a general strike than in Parliament, considering the results of parliamentary debates.

The Basque General Strike is also strongly backed at international level. Among the supporting unions from outside the Basque Country are: CSC, COS and IAC from Catalonia, CIG and CUT from Galicia, CSI from Asturias, Intersindical Canaria from Canary Islands, CUT, PURNA and Intersindical de Aragón from Aragon, SAT from Andalusia, COBAS and CSC from Castile-Spain, STC from Corsica, NPA and Solidaires from France, USB from Italy, PAME from Greece, PEO from Cyprus, CTA from Argentina, CTB and CGTB from Brazil, Únete from Venezuela, CITU and AITUC from India, etc. The strike is also backed by World Union Federation (representing 82 million workers), the Platform of Stateless Nations' Unions and sectoral union world federations (public services, metal and mining, construction and wood, etc.)

As usual, I won't work in my blogs for the 24 hrs of the strike journey, excepted maybe to report here on the strike itself.

Note: those from Bilbao can find some information on a wild array of planned struggle activities (pickets, marches, etc.) at Bilboko Branka and Elkartzen Bilbo sites (in Basque and/or Spanish). See you around.

Tuesday, May 28, 2013

Hmmm... it seems that the company is not getting as much profit as it should... No more talk: tomorrow I fire myself without indemnification or anything...! And, if I even think of protesting, I call the riot police so they break my head open!

Monday, May 27, 2013

Ah, the irony: ultraliberal (=ultracapitalist) and decadent Europe (EU) debates whether or not impose duties on Chinese cheap solar panels. Why? Because it is suspected that the overwhelming Chinese production necessarily required of state support.

Sure, probably very true. If so, why not to begin or retake at least some much needed state support for the economy here in Europe?

That is what is not being debated at all. The current desperate situation of European economy and society is only because of ultraliberalization and destroying by design the state involvement in the economy.

Class movements and organizations from all Europe (Portugal, Spain, France, Cyprus, Ireland, England, Scotland, Germany and Slovenia) gathered in Lisbon yesterday decided to call a continental multi-demonstration on June 1st under the slogan "Peoples United against the Troika".

According to Corriente Roja (Red Current, part of United Left - The Greens) the participants on this meeting make a call to:

... take the streets against the Troika, for democracy, for freedom and for social rights, to say no to the financial coup. We don't owe, we don't pay.

They say that today is necessary to unify the struggles of the working class and the peoples of the various states against the Troika and the European Union, which they describe as a war weapon to plunder the workers and the weakest countries for the profit of bankers and capitalists.

The historical squat Ubica of Utrecht (Netherlands) was evicted on May 24. Before surrendering to the overwhelming force of the police forces however the occupants attacked the city hall and set ablaze the plaza between the two buildings.

It took police a whole night and more to finally evict the whole building. Resistance means included fireworks and paint.

Since May 1st, 2013 more than a hundred
prisoners in migrant detention centers throughout the Netherlands have
gone on hunger and thirst strike. Some have already been broken by
intimidation and isolation, but some, such as Nessar,
who is on hunger and thirst strike in Rotterdam, are still on strike at
the time of writing (the 13th of May). Since he is a spokesperson for
the strikers, he was placed in isolation a few days ago. They are waking
him up every hour, refusing to allow independent doctors visits, and
since his kidneys are failing, he was brought yesterday, against his
will, to the penitentiary hospital.

Solidarity with the migrants in hunger strike

These strikes have only become known due to the solidarity demo’s
that took place in several migrant prisons on the 5th of May. The recent
hunger strikes deserve our full solidarity, as a desperate call for
dignity and freedom. In the Netherlands thousands of people are locked
up simply for being ‘illegal’. The ones who decide to take these
‘measures’, the ones who make laws to which everyone must bend, are the
ones profiting from control and repression.

A quite interesting documentary (35 mins) on how police techno-surveillance in the Internet and the streets alike is destroying our right to privacy and threatening innocent people. It's not very different from Orwell's dystopic nightmare "1984", just a bit less blunt, but just a bit...

The fiery riots of Sweden continued for the seventh night, not just in some 15 different neighborhoods of Stockholm but also in Örebro, Linköping and Uppsala. In Älvsjö a police station was torched and other facilities such as libraries, schools and jewelries were also set ablaze. At least 18 people were arrested.

In Southern Stockholm Nazi groups organized vigilante gangs which were tolerated by police. No specific incidents are known yet.

I guess it's almost trivial when you live in the vicinity of the worst nuclear catastrophe ever but a so-called Hadron Experimental Facility in Tokai, just north of Tokyo, had an accident today that released a soup of radioactive materials to outside the building, exposing at least 30 researchers and a provisional total of more than 50 people.

The various nuclear facilities of Tokai have suffered several serious accidents in the last two decades.

Sunday, May 26, 2013

The information I have is still patchy but it seems evident that the Nazi organization EDL, with ties to the Zionist-Nazi Utöya butcher A. Breivik, has been organizing rallies and racist manhunts across England. Antifascists have responded in great numbers.

The most reported confrontation took place in Newcastle, where at least 1000 antifascist citizens called by city councilors, labor unionists and anti-discrimination movements actively opposed the Nazi rally. However some of the leadership (with special mention for the SWP) decided to exclude the most militant antifascists of the Revolutionary Communist Group (FRFI) and led police against them, resulting in 14 arrests, after apparent set-up.

Internet freedoms will be the first victims of the Goebbelsian staged attack

Reactionary Interior Minister Theresa May has outlined her plans to exploit the false-flag "attack" to push forward fascist measures of ideological control on the Internet.

Initially at least these plans are being opposed by the Liberals, who support the government. Former minister Menzies Campbell said:

It would be the first time such powers could be given to monitor
people at risk of being radicalised. We would be using electronic
listening and other devices, as I understand it, for the first time for
people who were not suspected of indulging in criminal behaviour.

What
is being argued for by some is that all of us should be subject to
scrutiny of every telephone call we make, every text we send and every
internet site we visit. That is a very, very substantial intrusion into
people's lives.

So that is another key aspect of what they actually seem to intend with these scandalous false-flag attacks: the 21st century version of Fascism destroying Internet freedom by a dramatic escalation of censorship and persecution of freedom of speech or even of thought.

Law students in Valparaíso have occupied their faculty in demand of free quality education for all, with emphasis on the increased difficulties to apply for public grants (dozens of students are expected to lose their grants under the new measures of the far-right government).

At 3:45 in the night, police forces evicted violently the students, teachers and workers who were occupying the rectory of the University of Barcelona in protest for the budgetary cuts and the fascist project of a new educative law.

The Bedouin village of Atir-Umm al-Hieran, not far from Bir al Saba (Beersheva), has been destroyed again by the Zionist Regime, the Apartheid and Genocide Colonial Regime in Palestine. However this time it has been more brutal than ever before: all olive trees uprooted, every single home demolished, even the rubble, including all the belongings of the Palestinian Natives was taken away...

Oh, they are "Israeli citizens" on paper. But does it matter? Not at all. The Zionist Regime does not recognize their villages nor land claims, does not provide water nor electricity to them and regularly demolishes their homes. Still 30% of the population of the Negev, they are being forcibly relocated to small crowded urban settlements, totally unrelated with their traditional way of life, in a genocidal design known as Prawler Plan, condemned by the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, as well as by Amnesty International, and not even formally approved by the Apartheid legal bodies yet (should be voted on May 27th).

However the Native Palestinians seem determined to remain in their lands no matter what. According to Abu Ras:

“People are insisting on staying in their lands. They can demolish their houses, but they will stay on the land.”

While the mainstream media continues with their mercenary pipelining of such obviously manipulated information, I can't but find more and more evidence that the Woolworth attack was a blatantly obvious farce.

First of all a second video has surfaced with the footage of the alleged attacker speaking to a camera without any sign of blood on his hands, so now it seems it was not dry paint as I first imagined but mere mediocre photoshopping.

"Blood" here, nothing here... it must be magic!

I just watched this video a moment ago but has now become "private" (censorship?) In any case you can watch it at Webguerrillero by the moment (embedded soon enough).

Second there are plenty of images of the apparent victim without a single drop of blood apparent. Furthermore: no blood is seen on the road (where the body lays) nor on the nearby sidewalk. However later, when police and emergency services were already there, a track of blood appeared out of nothing on the sidewalk, just in front of the crashed car.

And nope, that late track of blood is not either blood from the "shot" attackers, because they were "shot" (no blood again, no videos either except a messy police air video and the police report) at another spot, on the road near the opposite sidewalk and what seems to be a small park of grass.

The oil track of the crashed car seems the only thing legit in this ridiculous scam.

Truth Frequency Radio finds the false flag attack so extremely poor quality that they think that the Monty Python did much better in this gag:

In spite of all, our "free media" (ahem) keep repeating the official version, showing that they have nothing of free or even journalist at all, but making true Goebbel's motto: a lie repeated a thousand times is a truth.

Never mind our political leaders like that babyface of Cameron: they have been shamelessly lying all the time, they would probably feel ashamed of saying a single truth, even if accidentally.

Friday, May 24, 2013

The most perilous elderly nuclear power plant of Garoña, located at the very border of the Basque Country, near Miranda de Ebro, and almost certain cause of many cancers and other unlikely diseases in young people raised in the area (I've known personally way too many), was scheduled to be closed on June 6th, after the owner, Nuclenor, disdained the official term to apply for yet another extension.

However the Spanish Nuclear Security Council has given them an in extremis extension of a whole year (cf. Naiz Info[es]), just two weeks before they should have closed down the facility (to the satisfaction of almost everyone). The single Fukushima-like GE reactor will have to remain in shutdown and empty of any fuel while the new application follows the extraordinary procedure but it does not matter because it is a clear signal that the radioactive generator will most likely be allowed to continue in existence forever and ever as a Damocles sword on the very physical survival of the Basque People.

Garoña was demonstrated unsafe again by this Greenpeace's action

The primary killer radius of Garoña includes major cities like Bilbao, Vitoria-Gasteiz, Santander, Burgos or Logroño. The effects of a Fukushima-style catastrophe would surely destroy the whole Ebor Valley, including Iruñea-Pamplona, Zaragoza, Lleida, etc. The very contunity of the Basque People is at the stake with this nuclear time bomb so close to us.

I was just raising the question of why all these false flag terror attacks? What do they want with them?

One aspect of the answer is the militarization of police forces in the USA and other countries and therefore the generalization of excessive force response by over-equipped police. Because it is well known that when a bureaucracy does not have a role, it creates it.

This most serious issue of the militarization of the police forces in the USA is discussed in depth by The Real News:

The video is just part of a wider report, which you can find in full at The Real News, with emphasis on the new legislation allowing for indefinite military detention, just one step short of total Fascism.

Thursday, May 23, 2013

After the normal doubts when the official version and your common sense conflict (hey, maybe this time they may be telling the truth: they cannot be such a bunch of compulsive liars, can they?), it seems that again the authorities lied on such a serious issue as the Boston Marathon bomb massacre, as they did with 9/11 and they probably did so many other times.

The evidence actually piles up to show that the Tsarnaev brothers are just convenient scapegoats and that the attack was probably made by US forces acting with incredible impunity and arrogance.

On the hotspot is particularly Craft International, an elite private paramilitary company, whose declared goals are to provide training for US military and police forces.

In the photos to the right we can see how several men uniformed as Craft Intl. personnel and carrying black backpacks, identical to the explosive device, are all the time around the area of the explosion, except, of course, when it did explode.

This is not really new, as I already mentioned it back in the day but then I was missing some key details: like a photo of the exploded backpack and some contextualization.

All this is provided in the photo-explanation at the right, which I took from Webguerrillero[es], and edited only to translate (back-translate?) the text to Spanish (and then also scale it to half its size for practical reasons, you can see a higher quality image at the original site but with the text in Spanish).

In the images it's apparent that one heavily tanned man, part of the Craft Intl. group, is a main suspect of actually placing the bomb (one of the two bombs) to any analytical and unprejudiced eye.

Webguerrillero also mentions that an anonymous message to 4chan, hours after the attack, did not just claim that it was a false-flag attack, but did forecast most of what we actually know happened later: that a 20-something youth was blamed and said he did because he is "unstable", and that "the suspect won't be found until the weekend, probably on Friday".

The site also claims that the elder brother was captured alive and then brutally murdered.

It is also probably worth mentioning that the founder and former CEO of Craft Intl., Chris Kyle, was murdered in a quite strange incident on February 2nd 2013, barely a month and half before the attack took place. I can't know if it is somehow related to the attack but I would not be surprised at all.

A few days ago, an acquaintance of the Tsarnaev brothers, a young Chechen man whom his father describes as unable to attack without being provoked, was murdered by an FBI agent while in custody (in an interrogation).

What do they want with these false-flag attacks?

I cannot be sure but something that the farcical attacks of London and Boston have in common is that they seem to want to scatter "Islamist terrorist" responsibility to common people, making every single Muslim (and by extension nearly every immigrant) suspect of terrorism, not anymore the product of organized action by well established organizations like the Western sockpuppet Al Qaeda, but of any other John Doe, or rather Muhammad Ali.

This, if we link with other campaigns like the criminalization of Afro-American resistance, leads to a single conclusion: White, Eurocentric, racism is being promoted as a way to attempt to restore, under US-NATO leadership now, the old colonial order that existed before the Cold War.

In parallel, it is known by all, how Nazi organizations are being institutionally promoted in all Europe, among other places, as a reserve force to strike against the Working Class, native or immigrant alike.

Also, what the unprecedented state of emergency declared in the suburbs of Boston after the attacks suggests is that they are also experimenting with popular reaction to state of emergency, which may well be the real drill being carried on in this case.

Finally they must also be testing the reactions of the media and the gullibility of the masses to these campaigns of institutional disinformation and blatant lies.

The London "attack" yesterday against an alleged soldier starts looking absolutely farcical.

As you may have watched in an "exclusive video" (see below), one of the purported attackers, who speaks bluntly to a passerby with a camera (no shouts of Allah u akbar at all, against what has been reported in the media) appears to have his hands and kitchen utensils (knife and ax) dramatically bloodied. However when we look at it all with calm that cannot be fresh blood but looks actually like red paint, alredy dry: not liquid nor dripping at all, the man even touches his sweater and not a single drop is visible on it.

Killing with a knife and a machete is a bloody affair: not just the clothes of the alleged attackers should be drenched in blood (and not just the hands and weapons) but the corpse should be still bleeding for a while even after death and a blood pool should be under and around him.

However when we watch the video we see absolutely nothing resembling blood anywhere around the corpse.

In spite of all this blatant evidence, the British government and police, as well as the Nazi party EDL, are treating it as a real "terrorist attack".

I must protest: not just because it is obviously a farce but because the quality of the show is totally substandard. Are they trying to test how gullible people is or what?

It is well known "pop science" that there is hardly better emergency product against rust than Coca-Cola. I have known for decades that meat dissolves in the black drink in just hours.

These are not the only effects: the soda drink also dissolves bones, iron, etc. In fact it is a main cause of osteoporosis among the young because it "steals" calcium from the bones.

The reason is one of the "secret" ingredients of this extremely popular beverage: phosphoric acid (E338), which has a Ph of just 2.8 (hyper-acidic) and is indeed corrosive. The raw ingredient must be carried in transports holding the warning of dangerous chemical.

Some 30 cars burned are the result of yet another night of rioting in Stockholm. Some incidents were also registered in the southern city of Malmö.

The violence began when, days ago, police killed an immigrant with alleged psychological problems who had barricaded himself in his apartment of Husby with his companion.

Swedish media have gathered reports by neighbors of this Stockholm suburb describing arbitrary and racist police attacks against anyone, including children and elderly people, along with continuous insults like "nigger", "rat", "monkey", etc. These reports have triggered an internal police investigation, it seems.

After decades of being one of the most advanced welfare states on Earth, Sweden converted itself to savage Capitalism after the murder of the charismatic Olof Palme in the 1990s, producing the greatest growth of inequality in all the OECD. While still retaining one of the highest standards of life of Europe, youth unemployment and poverty have been growing quite brutally with most dramatic effects on the immigrant communities.

Japanese stock market Nikkei collapsed today, falling 7.3%, the biggest slump since the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami that caused the Fukushima nuclear catastrophe.

Other global markets have followed the trend, as usually happens.

The "official" version of the causes, reflected for example by Euronews, blames Chinese and European economic weaknesses. However, would that be the case, why would Japan be the first market to collapse and so dramatically.

The real reasons therefore seem to be Japanese many weaknesses: first and foremost the effects of the Fukushima nuclear catastrophe, which, no matter how much you deny them, are very real and scaring everyone inside and outside the Asian archipelago. Another weakness is the absolutely brutal (and ever-growing) public debt and related excessive strength of the yen. This pre-dates the Fukushima disaster but have been aggravated by the loss of export markets after it.

After an elderly fascist offered himself as human sacrifice in the weirdest homophobic action ever (and a totally anti-Christian stunt, it must be said), a member of the direct action feminist movement FEMEN has expressed what we all, people of good will, feel about that Nazi: may he be tortured in Hell forever and ever (sadly I do not believe in Hell, but it's a true pity that there's no such a place to make some justice for class A mass criminals like Hitler, Pinochet, Franco or Thatcher, just to cite a few).

The daring nonviolent activist, whose name is not yet known to me, in the usual topless style of this organization, carrying on her torso the legend "May Fascism rest in Hell", parodied the suicidal stunt of the fascist homophobe Venner.

FEMEN explained in their Facebook page that they "call for the death of Fascism in the same spot where far right activist Dominique Venner killed himself yesterday evening".

The daring activist, who was brutally arrested by police, also wore on her back the legend: "In Gay we trust".

An FBI policeman shot dead Ibragim Todashev, 27, when he was being interrogated in Orlando, Florida. Police claims that Todashev "turned violent" but, even if that would be true, it seems hardly any pretext to kill a person who is being held in custody under heavy police surveillance and could have been easily restrained.

The major accusation against Capín, which seems totally made up (the usual), is aggression against police forces. Another accusation is that he would have helped to run away some people whom police tried to arrest. The alleged acts would have happened while he covered popular protests in Madrid on February 23rd and April 25th.

Luján is also being accused of aggression against police forces on April 25th (the usual accusation that police throws around taking advantage of the Spanish penal code, which considers police testimony as "evidence" of much greater weight than that of any common witness, not needing any actual evidence to back up their claims). He's also being accused of defamation for writing at Mundo Obrero that the rioters on that journey appeared to be plain clothes police agents.

Police harasses Rául Capín while working

Prior to the arrest, some far-right Spanish media, ABC, El Mundo, have been carrying a campaign against them, accusing them to be "radicals infiltrated" among the press.

Defense lawyers think that it is a warning message against independent media, because both photographers are well known for reporting without self-censorship on popular demonstrations of all kinds. They had been previously harassed by police.

A protest has been called for today at 18:00. The exact location I could not find out because the reference site tomalaplaza.net seems to be overloaded, so high is the popular interest on these clearly political arrests.

Wednesday, May 22, 2013

Chicago teachers see
themselves as engaged in a movement to defend the public sphere from
corporate acquisition. “Wall Street hedge funders and other speculators
are betting heavily on school privatization as the next great investment
frontier.”

Thousands
of Chicago teachers and their community allies marched and rallied for
three days in opposition to Mayor Rahm Emanuel and his handpicked school
board’s plans to close 54 public schools, almost all of them in Black
neighborhoods – the biggest round
of closings anywhere in the country, to date. Parents and teachers say
the plan puts children at greater risk as they cross the boundaries of
different gangs’ turf; destabilizes neighborhoods that will lose their
schools; and is part of a larger scheme to further decimate the teaching
ranks and convert more schools to charters. Teachers Union president
Karen Lewis says “study after study” has shown that shuffling children
around from school to school accomplishes nothing unless the new schools
are significantly better – yet, most of the cross-city movement in the
mayor’s plan is from one poor neighborhood to another.